The Measure

Creating a mystery box is not particularly challenging, that being an airplane crash some place isolated from time and space, a galleon lost in a reimagined version of hell, or the world waking to spaceships humming over the stratosphere. It's seldom a challenge.

The challenge is, in fact, opening the box to a satisfying, elegant resolution. As much as we are tempted to label books as good or bad, my particular appreciation stems significantly from the wondrous nature of how an abnormal situation is resolved, and how logical or sensical that resolution is when confronted with the established world built within the plot.

This is my preamble to establish that my particular taste and expectations may not match everyone else's, and your experience and appreciation for this novel may be dramatically different from mine. And why is that important?

Because the mystery box here is interesting until, half way in, it becomes clear that it happens in a universe with no cameras or monitoring systems. In fact, this version of our world is devoid of scientists or engineers, and is populated - apparently - by suburban cutouts of people who never really feel real. It's a superficial analysis of the social and political implications of a society in disarray, but one where every single actor is, at the core, a high middle class woman in costume. This is particularly notorious (and, at times, embarrassing) when, in order to build the world, the author throw a number of caricatures of stereotypical personae with no particular depth other than resembling House of Cards characters.

The light poking at politics and sterile commentary on social justice is insufficient to detract from the fact that the premise does not function as a plot device. Any attempt to establish a realistic response to the premise is very quickly discarded in favour of (what feels to me) an attempt at a soap opera-y pulls of the proverbial heartstrings - in fact, it is at par with the low expectations from the readership in terms of vocabulary and short POV chapter structure. And all this was, for me, unsatisfactory.

It is entirely possible this is just a novel intended as light summer reading. And that's OK. I guess.

Your mileage may vary.